How Anonymous Hackers Triumphed Over Time

Anonymous, a motley crew of online troublemakers known for hacking Sarah Palin and inducing seizures in epileptics, pulled off an historic coup this week when it successfully rigged Time magazine’s online poll for the “Top 100 most influential people.”

The loose confederation of trolls managed to outwit the techies at Time to arrange the voting results so that the first letters in the top 21 entries spell out the inside joke: Marblecake Also The Game.

The fun started when Time all but invited the online horde to mess with it by seeding the list of possible candidates with “moot” — AKA Christopher Poole — who runs 4chan, an Anomymous stronghold responsible for some of the best and worst of net culture.

According to the fine reporting of Paul Lamere at Music Machinery, Anonymous members soon figured out how to hack the poll via specially crafted URLs, then created automated tools once Time caught on and erased their early work.

When the magazine reacted by slapping a reCaptcha on the voting tool, Anonymous turned itself into a rogue Mechanical Turk, figuring out how to use human labor to quickly and cleverly fill out the are-you-a-human test. With hundreds of hours of distributed labor and clever tools, Anonymous was able to position each of the 21 names into the right spots, with moot as the winner.

That’s really quite an accomplishment — especially for a group known for calling each other “fags” — and Lamere’s two lengthy accounts of the process are worth reading. As for the meaning of Marblecake, it seems to be an odd reference to where some of the Anonymous leaders hung out while plotting how to undermine Scientology. Either that or it’s an obscene phrase.

Time.com managing editor Josh Tyrangiel says moot is no less deserving than previous title holders, like Nintendo video-game designer Shigeru Miyamoto (2007) and Korean pop star Rain (2006). “I would remind anyone who doubts the results that this is an Internet poll,” he wrote on the site. “Doubting the results is kind of the point.”

Anyhow, Threat Level, no fan of Anonymous’s previous handiwork, is happy to see the group improving its resume. Hacking Time‘s poll is way funnier than posting flashing gifs on an epilepsy bulletin board, and much cooler than standing on street corners wearing stupid masks in homage to an ideologically empty Hollywood movie.

And now that Anonymous has figured out this distributed work thing, perhaps they could turn their attention to finding a vaccine for swine flu.